Tong Family

Well, this is a truly nerdy post, but I just read that with Superhuman worth hundreds of millions, everyone is back to building the Superhuman of X keyboard shortcuts as the way to get common applications faster. I completely agree with that and those of us who have used vi forever sure know that is it better to type than to mouse. So here are some more keyboard fast applications. The only thing I’d add is that the really biggest change is fully embraced keyboard commands that can do everything a mouse click can. And, that the best interfaces are modal so that you don’t have to remember three keys (like Shift-Option-Right-Arrow which in Safari means next tab) but you have a simple single key ideally that is alphanumeric so for instance, with Vimari (see below, the next tab is w and previous is q reflecting the positioning on the keyboard for left and right used for things that know wasd as up, down, left, right respectively).

The Sublime of X is a great post about other products that worked the same way. All of these cost money, so some notes and also how to get freeware if it is there:

1. Fman. This is a file finder or explorer, personally, I think rg and fzf are the better examples of super fast. But I will have to try Fman.
2. Linear.app. If there is a better task tracker out there than Trello, which is very pretty but completely gooey, I’m all ears (or fingertips).
3. Cron.app. Ok, a calendar application that is not clunky, got to try that.

But you can also push your current product a little harder too:

1. Vimari. I’ve been using this and it does work well, it’s a port of Vimium for Chrome and the basic idea is that if you type f then you can jump to any link plus lots more shortcuts. This thing is actually pretty great because it repurposes all those useless keys in browse mode to do useful things. Then simple things like kjhl to scroll up, down, left right and other things that work just like Vi. like gg to the bottom or G to the top. And then simple extensions like gi means go to input. And finally, just like vi, modes which are inserted with i, or hit ESC to enter command mode.
2. Vim gx (broken right now, but hopefully will be fixed soon). Well the keyboard shortcuts never stop here, the latest one for me is gx which means go to whatever is under the cursor. If it happends to be a Markdown URL, then if on the Mac you set in your .vimrc, the magic let g:netrw_browser_view='open' and there is an entire plugin dedicated to figuring out the so called netrwFileHanders.vim so that when you get extended I’m guessing the right editor or viewer opens up. Netrw means network read/write and was originally created to allow editing over FTP or RCP or other protocols.

Silly aside on vim and let vs set

As an aside, this let me (no pun intended) finally figure out the difference between set and let in vi. Set is an option whereas let is for variables. This seems like a bit of strange historical difference, but it turns out that a set variable like number is different that a variable which can have g: in front indicating is it global, so you can set number or set nonumber and you can also let &number=1 and it is all the same by the same token, you can query with set number? or for a variable it is just let g:variable so isn’t that asymmetric?